REVIEW Independent film 'Silver City' takes jab at president

Stars are eager to sign on to work with filmmaker John Sayles.
By JANE SUMNER
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Look out when big, strapping John Sayles, the godfather of independent film, gets mad at the Bush administration.
He's not going to take it anymore -- not without doing what he knows how to do better, cheaper and quicker than most directors in the biz. And that's make a movie that questions where America is headed.
The result is "Silver City," a political lampoon-cum-murder mystery with a crack crew of actors except for Danny Huston, who -- weak and mild in the lead -- seems miscast.
It's Sayles' "Fahrenheit 9/11" and a bit of a narrative disappointment. Still, even mediocre Sayles is better than much of the puerile dross served up by the studios.
"Silver City" starts out with great promise but substitutes polemics for the filmmaker's trademark good talk, a sledgehammer for his thoughtful subtlety. It's sometimes provocative and very funny but too often heavy-handed and familiar.
Shot for $5 million in Denver and Leadville on Super-16, transferred to digital and blown up to 35mm, "Silver City" looks great, but then it should. Two-time-Oscar-winner Haskell Wexler, 81, handled its sun-washed cinematography.
Plot
"Silver City" opens with Richard "Dickie" Pilager (Chris Cooper), the grammatically challenged, born-again and "user-friendly" son of a rich senator, running for governor of Colorado. Sayles is too alarmed about corporate exploitation of the country -- and the countryside -- to be coy about his satiric target.
But when Dickie reels in a cyanide-laced corpse while shooting an environmental TV ad at a lake, his win-at-all-costs campaign manager Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss) hires ex-journalist turned private eye Danny O'Brien (Danny Huston) to investigate. Is it an accident? Or grim prank?
Off goes sleuth Danny to interview three suspects at odds with the Pilager clan: a rabid right-wing talk show host (Miguel Ferrer), a fallen EPA crusader (Ralph Waite) and the candidate's estranged dope-smoking sister (Daryl Hannah).
Ensemble players Billy Zane, Michael Murphy, Kris Kristofferson, Mary Kay Place, Thora Birch and always-electric Tim Roth pass through with fleeting too-brief cameos, but Tijuana-born Sal Lopez and debuting Mexican actress Alma Delfina stand out in small, key roles.
Actors on Sayles' shoots do without trailers and usually are paid the Screen Actors Guild minimum wage, but that doesn't keep top talent from signing on with the blue-collar filmmaker of "The Brother from Another Planet" and "Matewan."
They do it out of eagerness to work with the writer-director-editor, who has never hidden his humanity or social conscience. He doesn't just entertain. He gives you something to chew on, maybe haunt your dreams.
If "Silver City" isn't in the same class as his "Lone Star," it's still worth a look and there's a chilling zinger of a final scene that almost redeems its shortcomings.